During the Vietnam War, airpower commanded more American resources than any other aspect of the struggle. More than half of the hundreds of billions of dollars America invested in the war was devoted to U.S. Air Force, Army, and Navy air operations. The United States dropped over 8 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1962 to 1973 and lost over 8,588 fixed‐wing aircraft and helicopters. U.S. military air crew losses totaled 4,302 by 1973. For all this investment, airpower, while occasionally influential, was never decisive.
The U.S. Air Force dates its involvement in Vietnam to the summer of 1950, when it sent advisers to help France maintain and operate U.S.‐manufactured aircraft in the war with the Viet Minh. After the Viet Minh victory and the partitioning of the country into North and South in 1955, America continued sending air advisers to Vietnam. By 1961, six South Vietnamese squadrons were ready for combat, supported by an American combat training detachment known as “Farm Gate.” The boundary between fighting and training for U.S. Air Force personnel during the early 1960s was never clearly defined. The Farm Gate commandos believed they were primarily to fly close air support missions for the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), but their official rules of engagement precluded them from engaging in combat without a member of the South Vietnamese Air Force in the aircraft or in self‐defense.
By the end of 1962, more than 3,000 U.S. Air Force advisers were serving in Vietnam. American pilots flew air support and reconnaissance missions; they also transported ARVN troops around the country, and defoliated jungle areas with C‐123 “Ranch Hand” aircraft. During the latter program, which lasted over ten years, the air force sprayed 19.22 million gallons of herbicides and defoliants over approximately 5.96 million acres of the country.
After the Tonkin Gulf incidents in August 1964 and a surprise Viet Cong sapper attack on the U.S. air base at Bien Hoa in November, President Lyndon B. Johnson slowly began to raise the intensity of the air war. He initiated Operation Barrel Roll, a series of interdiction missions flown along the infiltration routes developing in the Laotian panhandle. When the Viet Cong attacked a second air base at Pleiku in February 1965, Johnson retaliated with raids against targets just north of the demilitarized zone (DMZ). Initially known as Flaming Dart, these reprisal missions evolved into a sustained air campaign, Operation Rolling Thunder, beginning in March 1965.
Rolling Thunder was the longest air campaign in American military history. Between March 1965 and November 1968, navy, air force, and Marine aviation flew 2 million sorties and dropped 1 million tons of bombs on North Vietnam. Rolling Thunder had several objectives. One was to persuade Hanoi to abandon its support of the southern insurgency; another was to raise the morale of military and political elites in South Vietnam; and the third was interdiction—strikes against logistics targets such as bridges, roads, and railroads designed to reduce Hanoi's ability to support the war in the South.
Though Rolling Thunder attacked strategic targets such as electric plants and fuel storage facilities, the limited number of these targets and restrictions against bombing near Hanoi, Haiphong, and the Chinese border made interdiction its prime focus. Throughout the campaign, American pilots clamored to “go downtown” (bomb Hanoi), but President Johnson, who approved and sometimes picked the targets, constantly turned down these requests. He believed the threat of more intensive destruction implicit in limited, incremental bombing would have a greater impact on Hanoi's willingness to negotiate than an all‐out terror offensive. He also believed that this gradualist approach would stave off possible Chinese intervention.
For pilots, the most frustrating aspect of the bombing restrictions was that most North Vietnamese fighter bases and surface‐to‐air missile (SAM) batteries fell within restricted areas. To cope with these defenses, the services developed elaborate “strike packages” consisting of fighter‐bombers, fighter escorts, electronic warfare aircraft, search and rescue planes, and airborne command and control aircraft. Yet North Vietnamese air defenses claimed over 900 American aircraft during Rolling Thunder. Most of these aircraft were downed by simple 23–100 mm antiaircraft artillery. The North used high‐altitude SAMs to compel American aircraft to fly low, thereby bringing them within range of their guns. Russian‐built MiGs were used sparingly, generally making just one pass before retreating home. These “guerilla” tactics yielded meager results: only seventy‐six planes shot down during the war, or about 7 percent of U.S. fixed‐wing losses over the North. On the other hand, such caution made the U.S. kill ratio just 2.5 to 1 from 1965 to 1973; consequently only five Americans qualified as aces (with five or more “kills”).
Overall, Rolling Thunder failed to accomplish its major objectives. Although the bombing caused an estimated $600 million worth of damage to North Vietnam, it did not prevent the Communist forces from launching the Tet Offensive in 1968, nor did it bring about a negotiated peace settlement.
Most histories of the air war focus on the bombing of North Vietnam; yet the United States dropped far more tonnage in the South over the course of the war. By 1973, the year of U.S. withdrawal, the “in‐country” war claimed 4 million tons. By contrast, only 1 million tons had been dropped on North Vietnam. To begin this effort, 21,000 air force personnel and 500 aircraft were deployed to South Vietnam in 1965.
The impetus behind this massive buildup was close air support. These missions were generally flown by small fighters like the F‐100 Supersabre, but beginning in June 1965, B‐52s (U.S. strategic bombers) being flown from Guam were used as well. By the end of the war, 75 percent of all B‐52 “Arc Light” strikes had flown against targets in South Vietnam, 20 percent to Laos, and 5 percent against the North. During the siege of Khe Sanh, B‐52s dropped 60,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnamese positions just outside the Marine base. This joint operation, dubbed Niagara, is generally credited with compelling the North Vietnamese to lift their siege of the beleaguered outpost.
Besides close air support, B‐52s also flew interdiction missions in Cambodia and Laos during 1968–72. President Richard M. Nixon employed B‐52s to pulverize supply storage areas along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia. Beginning on March 1969, these secret “Menu” bombings in Cambodia lasted 14 months, during which B‐52s flew 3,630 sorties into Cambodia and dropped 100,000 tons of bombs. In Laos, B‐52s created landslides in mountain passes vital to Ho Chi Minh's logistical system. These missions fell under the rubric of Operation Commando Hunt, an interdiction campaign that lasted from November 1968 to April 1972.
The many exotic weapons used during Commando Hunt included an elaborate sensor system known as Igloo White, antipersonnel mines, and AC‐130 Specter gunships. B‐52s established blocking belts by creating landslides and sewing roads with mines. After mines were laid and major passes blocked, air force planners would send in Specter gunships to blast resulting traffic bottlenecks with their 20‐ and 40mm cannons and 105mm howitzers. The Specters even located trucks and personnel at night, using low‐light television cameras and infrared heat‐seeking technology.
For all its wizardry, Commando Hunt had little impact upon the Communist ability to wage war. In fact, the North launched its biggest offensive to date in 1972, with over 120,000 regulars and 200 armored vehicles. President Nixon responded to this Easter Offensive by launching a new wave of air attacks against North Vietnam. The resulting Linebacker I raids were designed to hinder the North Vietnamese invasion of the South by destroying its petroleum storage facilities, power‐generating plants, and major bridges. This campaign became a watershed in airpower history because it was the first to place heavy reliance on precision‐guided munitions. Laser‐ and television‐guided bombs enabled small numbers of aircraft to destroy heavily defended targets from extreme distances. By the end of June, the air force and navy had demolished or damaged 400 bridges in North Vietnam, including ones, such as the Paul Doumer Bridge, Hanoi, that had been bombed repeatedly earlier to no effect.
In October 1972, peace seemed close at hand and Nixon halted the bombing of the North. Le Duc Tho, the North's chief negotiator, had presented substantially new terms and a settlement seemed imminent. However, South Vietnamese demands for changes stalled the talks. By early December, agreement was in shambles, and Nixon launched a second series of Linebacker attacks. Known as the “Christmas bombings,” the eleven‐day Linebacker II campaign in late December was the most intense air assault of the war. Tactical aircraft flew more than 1,000 sorties and B‐52s about 740 against targets in the heart of Hanoi and Haiphong. The North Vietnamese fought back with everything available and destroyed twenty‐seven American aircraft, including eighteen B‐52s; but by the end of the campaign, Hanoi had expended its entire supply of antiaircraft missiles and B‐52s could fly over the North Vietnamese cities with impunity.
The eleven‐day air campaign and its impact upon the peace negotiations is still a point of controversy in Vietnam War historiography. “Revisionist” histories of the war, mostly written by participants, argue that such a campaign early in the struggle could have yielded an American victory. Recently, a second group of historians has challenged this conventional wisdom. Mark Clodfelter (1989) argues that the Linebacker campaigns “worked” in 1972 because Nixon's political goals were limited to securing an American withdrawal and a cease‐fire. Moreover, the nature of the ground war in 1972 was conventional. Such an approach, maintains Clodfelter, could not have been replicated earlier on during the guerrilla struggle, when America's goal was to defeat a popular insurgency in the South. Earl H. Tilford (1991) takes the argument a step further. He contends that, in the final analysis, “it was the Air Force and Navy's very own leaders that failed to develop a strategy appropriate for the war at hand.” Could any air strategy, though, have won the conflict? Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Maxwell Taylor's response in 1975 was an unequivocal no. According to him, “we didn't know our ally. Secondly, we knew even less about the enemy. And the last, most inexcusable of our mistakes, was not knowing our own people.”
[See also Army Combat Branches: Aviation; Bombing of Civilians; Marine Corps Combat Branches: Aviation Forces; Vietnam War: Military and Diplomatic Course; Vietnam War: Changing Interpretations.]
Bibliography
- Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, Strategy for Defeat: Vietnam in Retrospect, 1978.
- Robert F. Futrell, The United States Air Force in Southeast Asia: The Advisory Years to 1965, 1981.
- John B. Nichols and Barrett Tilman, On Yankee Station: The Naval Air War Over Vietnam, 1987.
- John Schlight, The United States Air Force in Southeast Asia: The Years of Offensive, 1965–1968, 1988.
- Earl H. Tilford, Setup: What the Air Force Did in Vietnam and Why, 1991.
- Mark Clodfelter, The Limits of Air Power: The American Bombing of North Vietnam, 1989.
- Kenneth H. Bell, 100 Missions North, 1993.
- John Trotti, Phantom Over Vietnam: Fighter Pilot, USMC, 1993.
- Marshall L. Michel III, Clashes: Air Combat Over North Vietnam 1965–1972, 1997
